The Shattered Ring

In the service of the Conference of Worlds

Turbine

Turbine is a gas giant. Its inhabitants ride on immense gas-trawler city ships that float through its upper atmosphere, filtering vast quantities of atmosphere through dangling scoops to collect the rich and extraordinarily volatile elements that Turbine has in abundance.

The trawlers of turbine are each built around a tiny ship of The First, which follow their own unknowable courses through the gas giant’s turbulent weather systems. Little is known of the tiny core ships, except what control there is over them is tightly guarded by a priestly order called the Knowing.

Turbine is prone to massive firestorms, and the city ships weather incredible forces in their pursuit of chemical riches. Ruled by hereditary merchant princes known as the Helium Lords, the people of Turbine are a proud and fractious folk, prone to intrigue and infighting.

Turbine’s primary chemical export is metastable metallic hydrogen, the finest spaceship fuel available to the cluster. Almost all other resources have to be imported, from food and water to metals and even the air they breathe. Despite this Turbine’s fuel is so valuable that the Helium Lords have grown immensely wealthy through it’s supply to other worlds, particularly Zvitter and Heorot.

The rest of the system is quite empty, but at each of the slippoints there are refueling stations run by Zvitter Consortium subsidiary Morgan Fuels. Fortunately for Morgan Fuels as well as those refueling, the princes are constantly undercutting each others prices. Some suspect the ongoing infighting between the trawlers might be partially incited by outside influences for exactly that reason.